Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left

Chapter One: Gateway Blues

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.—Karl Marx, Capital

I think America is growing more and more complicated, and it seems to me that our conversation is not keeping up with that complexity. This … dialogue began [with the suggestion] … that the unfinished business of America is black and white, but it strikes me that… what we really need to do is understand how complex this country is, with Samoan rap groups and Filipinos and Pakistani cab drivers, and the racial relationships now in America are so complex and so rich that it seems to me that we don’t have a language even to keep up with that complexity.—Richard Rodriguez, in A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton

Why is there no real American left? How has the United States managed to avoid the degree of class-based social conflict characteristic of the politics of most Western societies? Although various arguments have been offered to explain American exceptionalism and the failure of socialism to establish a foothold in the United States as it has elsewhere in the West, my discussion will focus on the significance of one factor—race—and its role in the unmaking of the American left. I will argue that the particular demographic circumstances that have existed throughout American history, along with the way in which these circumstances have been interpreted and processed and, in particular, racialized, have contributed significantly to the unique pattern of social relations one finds in the United States.

To understand the relationship between race and American exceptionalism properly requires reexamination of the concepts and approaches that are commonly used to explain the absence of the American left. Unfortunately, investigations into the exceptionalism phenomenon have often employed methodologies and conceptual strategies that have guaranteed a misunderstanding of the real reasons why there is no American left. Indeed, procedural choices and disciplinary limitations have encouraged some analysts to underrate the significance of the issue itself.

For instance, the historian Sean Wilentz suggests that the exceptionalism debate has resulted from a basic misreading of American labor history and an overstatement of the pace and significance of events in European labor history. Consequently, he argues, there is a history of class consciousness in the United States comparable to that of working-class movements in Britain and on the Continent.¹ Indeed, Wilentz concludes that the exceptionalism issue is a colossal non-problem and that the predominance of the exceptionalism perspective has warped the analyses of American social historians.² Similarly, the historian George M. Fredrickson suggests, The notion that the United States has exhibited radical peculiarities that have made its experience categorically different from that of other modern or modernizing countries has encouraged an oversimplified and often idealized view of the American past.³ Whether accepting or rejecting Wilentz’s and Fredrickson’s arguments about the significance of the issue, many American labor and social historians have approached the question in these same terms: the degree of working-class consciousness, and the relative strength of leftist parties and labor union solidarity.⁴

Yet limiting the study of the American left and the exceptionalism issue to the examination of attitudes, events, and movements without considering results and achievements has arguably resulted in a less accurate and nuanced understanding of the significance and derivation of the peculiar nature of the American political culture. Very few analysts approach the study of the left in a comprehensive manner. A search for the American left—or any left—should work from the understanding that a left is a means to the creation of a certain kind of society and a certain set of public goods. Beyond the lack of a leftist political party and a radicalized working class, the most striking feature of the American political culture is its inability to produce and maintain some basic public goods: comprehensive health care, sufficient housing provisions, effective worker organization and protection, and consistent police protection. To this list one could add gun control legislation, quality elementary and secondary education, public transportation, and inclusive voter registration procedures. In other words, the search for the American left might not be, as Wilentz suggests, a colossal non-problem but an attempt to understand how and why the American political culture has failed to manifest the collective will to produce a set of public goods.⁵

At another level, any search for the missing American left must make the effort to study the phenomenon in the wider (political) cultural context. Perhaps because American leftists have often been perceived to function as extracultural aliens within the context of their society, able to look into but unable to lock onto the popular imagination as an organic expression of the culture’s collective psyche, historians and political scientists have tended to approach the historical development of the left outside the context of American society. In significant contrast, in the other Western societies leftist movements have arisen as organic grassroots expressions of their respective political cultures.⁶ The study of the American left, then, needs to proceed beyond the cataloguing of words and sentiments to some understanding of the movement’s function—specifically, to create and maintain the provision of a certain set of public goods. These studies must also entail investigation of the social roots of leftist movements, as well as identification of the basic cultural sensibilities and conditions that lead to the development or nondevelopment of a leftist movement. Culture needs to be addressed in the study of the left as a potential source or medium of leftist sentiment and also as a text that can be read in order to expose a society’s underlying structure.

Overall, a reorganization of the manner in which the missing American left is examined will do much to change the nature of the conclusions that are drawn concerning the causes and sources of its weakness. In other words, a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the history of the American left—including considerations of public policy and popular culture, as well as class consciousness, labor movements, and leftist parties—will clarify that its marginalization has been, to a significant degree, a function of the popular fascination with race.

This preoccupation with race has affected the prospects of American leftist movements in various ways. At the most basic level, the strength of the popular attachment to racial categories has reduced the appeal of class-based movements. Leftist organizations, consequently, have been marginalized because their efforts to mobilize members of the working classes conflicted with the more deeply rooted and developed racial identifications of these constituencies to such an extent that even those leftist campaigns which did not seek to challenge racial norms were still perceived as threats to the racial status quo (e.g., the American Federation of Labor [AFL] before the civil rights era). Thus challenges to the economic status quo have been interpreted, legitimately I might add, as potential or implicit challenges to prevailing racial understandings. In this context those movements of the left which questioned social conventions regarding race explicitly were even less appealing to crucial working-class constituencies (e.g., the American Communist Party after 1928).

The left’s ability to organize effectively has also been restricted because of conflicts within and between different organizations over whether antiracist and antinativist principles should be adopted and promoted. The energies consumed by debates between nativist and racist elements and those actors advocating inclusive mobilization strategies reduced the left’s capacity to launch coordinated campaigns (e.g., the battles that took place within the AFL and the labor movement as a whole). The expression of nativist and racist sentiments by leftists also, of course, alienated immigrant and black workers from leftist causes, an alienation that employers and the left’s opponents could exploit for their own purposes to weaken unions and other leftist organizations. This distrust and mutual hostility also resulted in separate labor and political organizations, as those groups excluded from the mainstream left established their own institutions to pursue their own agendas.

Last, with regard to the general ways in which racial dynamics have affected leftist outcomes, leftist organizations (and indeed many analysts of the. left) have underestimated the importance of the issues of race and ethnicity and their effects on the left’s chances. Even those leftists who were not explicitly racist failed to appreciate the ramifications of leaving the racial status quo unchallenged. For example, until the civil rights movement, the main arena in which racial forces trumped class coalitions was the American South. The South represented—and to a lesser degree continues to represent—the major geographic base of American conservatism. But the left characteristically avoided engaging southerners as aggressively as it did constituencies elsewhere to such a degree that it guaranteed its marginalization at the national level. This is not to argue that if leftist organizations had been more active in the South that the outcomes would have been much different, all things remaining equal. Such a claim would require imagining American leftists being able to rise above the circumstances—the racialized society—that produced them in the first place, as well as a different American South—a different America—somehow more open to these appeals.⁷ Rather, the failure of leftists to understand that their absence in the South meant they would have limited influence nationally (e.g., as evidenced in the classic American socialist formulation that racial issues and the South itself could be dealt with after the revolution) is a reflection of the pervasive influence of race in American life and the common misunderstanding of the stakes involved. The extent to which race has been naturalized, to the point that its importance and broader implications are often overlooked, has been reflected in the strategies and priorities adopted by American leftists throughout the nation’s history and arguably, to a significant degree, in the work of the analysts—historians, sociologists, and political scientists—who have considered the exceptionalism phenomenon.

Approaches to the Gateway

In their classic text Voting, Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and William McPhee describe the gateway as an entrypoint … through which an endless succession of social proposals have passed, are passing, and will pass.⁸ For the purposes of this discussion, the gateway can be understood in both this narrow sense and in a broader sense as the barrier, as that collection of restraining influences, dividing the accepted, normal, and feasible in American politics from the understandings and sensibilities that are common in other (political) cultures.

The relationship under examination in this discussion, then, is that between the individualized interpretation of industrialization (in other words, the combination of a certain conception of how the individual should interact with the collective, and the development of a certain package of technological innovations and possibilities, such as the printing press, the steam engine, the microphone, the automobile) and the nature of the society’s response to this challenge. Theoretically, the responses could range from a complete rejection of the individualist interpretation of social possibilities to a partial acceptance and to an enthusiastic endorsement of the ideals and institutions of this new perspective. Overall, then, here I attempt to understand how the forces of individualism and collectivism interact in different contexts.

The emergence of labor movements and socialist parties, the forces that can be characterized as the conventional left, is a sign that at least some significant elements within the larger society are willing to oppose the arguments and actions of the individualists. At another level, instead of solely discussing the conventional left, as many analysts have already done, one can focus on the creation, provision, or maintenance of a particular set or type of public goods (i.e., comprehensive and redistributive). Such an elaboration would render the emergence of a conventional left as a related but not essential aspect of the society’s resistance. One could argue that a conventional leftist movement is not necessarily the only means by which certain public goods can be produced or maintained, nor is it the only sign of a society’s resistance to individualist ideals. From a historical perspective, one might suggest that the conventional left, while the most visible and dominant indicator of resistance at the end of the nineteenth century, is no longer the most likely or even effective means by which resistance can be expressed and operationalized. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, perhaps contemporary efforts to establish and maintain public goods are best mobilized by and situated in other agents and media (e.g., collective economic enterprises, popular culture, and other social movements). These goods could be achieved without the emergence of a conventional left, possibly as a result of some basic social consensus. In this sense, the conventional left can be seen as an intermediate public good, as a means to the achievement of certain legislation and the preservation of a certain way of life, but not necessarily the only means toward achieving these goals. Certainly the leftist agenda with regard to preferred public goods and priorities has changed as new conditions, technologies, and possibilities have arisen and as new information has become available. One should expect, then, that unions and, to a lesser extent, parties, as the mainsprings of leftist activity and the main measures of leftist achievement, might not be as crucial today as they were perceived to be a century or even two decades ago. Consequently, in the discussion of the conventional left in Chapters 2 and 3, 1 focus on the period between the Civil War and the Second World War, while devoting some attention to subsequent developments; in Chapters 4 and 5, analyzing the New Deal and public policy, I emphasize developments from the 1930s to the present.

Beyond the emergence of the conventional left and the provision of a certain kind of public goods, the extent of resistance to the ideals of the individualist perspective can be observed in the way a society makes and remakes its culture, in the way it reproduces itself. The degree to which the individualist argument has been accepted should be evident in the extent to which the aggregate culture has been atomized and fragmented and in the degree to which the common, although often idealized, understandings that previously gave structure and meaning to the society have been gutted or abandoned. It is the cultural arena from which many crucial issues and debates have arisen over the course of the last half century and from which many of the significant social movements have drawn sustenance.

The left, then, can be understood as having three aspects: the conventional conception, labor movements and socialist parties; the availability of a certain set or type of public goods; and the prevalence of a certain sensibility or set of cultural values (this third realm will be the focus of Chapter 6). These aspects of the left are also interactive. Conventional leftist organizations—labor unions and parties—characteristically lobby for public goods such as health care, unemployment insurance, pensions, and access to the franchise, and to the extent that the conventional left is weak, a key contributor to campaigns for a comprehensive public policy apparatus is lacking. Similarly, popular culture’s ability to produce and promote collective sensibilities aids the conventional left in its membership drives and efforts to mobilize support for public policy changes. Comprehensive public goods that enhance collective sensibilities and attachments break down the barriers that might weaken the potential support base for unions and social democratic parties, and they engender the humanistic understanding that might overcome social differences.

Table 1.1. Unionization Rates (%) in Selected Countries, 1901–1961

Sources: See Walter Galenson, Comparative Labor Movements (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), p. 205; Commonwealth Labour Reports, 1891–1941: Historical Statistics of Canada, 2d ed. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983), pp. E175–77; A. G. Hines, Trade Unions and Wage Inflation in the U.K., 1893–1961, Review of Economic Studies 31 (1964): 250–51; and Bureau of Labor Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Department of Labor, 1963).

Notes: The statistics for the United States for 1911 are actually from 1910. Similarly, the 1921 figure is from 1920. Reliable historical statistics for union density are not available for most countries (including France, Germany, and Italy).

Defining and Explaining American Exceptionalism

Given this dynamic, where the emergence and promotion of the individualized interpretation of industrialization provokes a society to respond at a number of related levels, what factor or factors can explain the American case and American exceptionalism? In every Western society except the United States, there are relatively viable leftist parties and significant labor movements. Furthermore, in these states certain public goods are taken for granted, such as comprehensive health care, inclusive voter registration procedures, affordable higher education, and a certain standard of public safety. Finally, there persists a meaningful collective sensibility.

This pattern has not been repeated in the United States. Besides the absence of a leftist party espousing socialist or social democratic principles, in terms of labor organization, the United States features the lowest rate of union density among its Western counterparts, except for France, where union membership is not linked to benefits and labor’s influence has never been a function of unionization rates (see Tables 1.1 and 1.2).⁹ While it can be plausibly argued that the absence of a strong conventional left might not imply the absence of a resilient collectivist spirit (e.g., France) and although it would be inadvisable to base assertions of exceptionalism solely on the weakness of the American left and its labor movement, given that the conventional left is on the defensive throughout most of the industrialized world, a marked difference exists between the public goods available to American citizens and those available to citizens of other Western states. Social and regulatory policies are not easily operationalized empirically for the purposes of comparative analysis; nevertheless, the United States has generally been slower than its European counterparts to provide a range of public goods such as worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security (see Table 1.3). The United States is also the only Western industrialized nation that has neither a comprehensive health care program nor a state-sponsored national voter registration system. For every major domestic program, suggests Richard Rose, the American government makes less effort than the average OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] nation.¹⁰ Overall, the absence of a significant conventional left has been reflected in the nature of the development of American public policy.¹¹

Table 1.2. Unionization Rates (%) in Selected Countries, 1970–1995

Sources: Jelle Visser, Trends in Union Membership, in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Employment Outlook, 1991 (Paris: OECD, 1991), pp. 97–134, and International Labour Organization, World Labour Report: Industrial Relations, Democracy and Social Stability (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1997), pp. 237–38.

Notes: The figures in the third column (1985) are all from that year except those for Germany and the GDR (1991) and for Luxembourg (1987). The figures in the fourth column (1995) are all from that year except those for Canada, Ireland, the GDR, and the GFR (1993) and for Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland (1994).

Table 1.3. Dates of First Statutory Programs

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Programs throughout the World, Research Report no. 58 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Research and Statistics, 1981).

Notes: All the Canadian provinces had occupational hazards legislation by 1918 except Prince Edward Island (1931). It should be noted that the dates refer to the first general national programs. Consequently, the United States is considered to have initiated health benefits in 1965 (Medicaid and Medicare) even though these programs covered only the poor and the aged.

Thus the question is, why has the United States been slower and more reluctant to provide these public goods than its Western counterparts? The oldest explanations for American exceptionalism are those derived from the Turner thesis—the notion that the frontier experience affected American society uniquely by shaping basic societal values and by making possible a significant degree of (conflict-depressing) social mobility.¹² An associated suggestion is implicit in David Potter’s People of Plenty: the notion that Americans have been particularly blessed in material gifts.¹³ These types of explanations face certain problems, though, for as Eric Foner states, they raise as many questions as they answer. First they rest upon assumptions about the standard of living of American workers that are rarely subjected to empirical verification. Have the wage levels and rates of social mobility of American workers always been significantly higher than in Western Europe?¹⁴ Furthermore, as Foner notes, mobility and increasing material wealth can be interpreted as both destabilizing and stabilizing factors, as was evidenced in the artisan radicalism of the early nineteenth century.¹⁵ Often greater prosperity and possibilities lead to greater expectations and demands. And greater aggregate wealth has not prevented the persistence of poverty in the United States, nor has it led to the provision of certain basic social benefits (see Tables 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6).¹⁶

Table 1.4. Children, Elderly, and All Persons (%) Living in Poverty, by Country, 1979–1982

Sources: John Palmer, Timothy Smeeding, and Barbara Torrey, eds., The Vulnerable (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 1988), adapted from tables 5.2, 5.6, and 5.8; and Arnold Heidenheimer, Hugh Heclo, and Carolyn Teich Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 253.

Notes: Poverty is defined in terms of the official poverty line in the United States converted to other currencies using OECD purchasing power parities and adjusted for family size.

One could suggest that the timing and impact of wars have crucially influenced leftist development in the United States. Certainly various wars, especially the two world wars, have had significant effects on the fortunes of the American left, but similar effects were experienced throughout the West.¹⁷ Indeed, the disruption of European leftist development caused by the two world wars was arguably greater, especially if one factors in the antileftist influence of the American Marshall Plan. A similar argument would suggest that the division of the American left over tactics (reform versus revolution) and allegiances led to its downfall. This argument, made by such analysts as Milton Cantor in The Divided Left and David Shannon in The Decline of American Communism, fails adequately to recognize that this division occurred throughout the West, again, possibly to a greater extent in Europe.¹⁸ A third variant of this approach can be seen in The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, in which James Weinstein suggests that effective labor repression (e.g., the Palmer raids after World War I and the attacks on the left that took place during the McCarthy era), combined with a cunning, cooptive state apparatus, prevented the development of an American left.¹⁹ Once again, this process was not unique to the United States (note, for example, the impact of Otto von Bismarck in early Prussia), and as an answer it only begs the question, Why was this degree of repression possible?

Explanations have been offered on the basis of formal political considerations such as the resilience of the two-party system and the manner in which changing political styles resulted in a declining rate of popular participation in the political process, but neither argument explains convincingly why such developments were possible or significant. For instance, Michael McGerr argues that the decline of popular politics did have at least one tangible consequence of enduring importance. As voter turnout fell in the twentieth century, significant challenges to conventional politics diminished.²⁰ What McGerr does not explain is why, given the growing depopularization of American politics, the public did not become even more disposed to support and develop unconventional political parties and movements.²¹ Furthermore, such explanations tend to overlook the nature of partisan conflict in the American South (not treated by McGerr), which has often involved a series of one-party systems (or no-party systems in some cases, according to V. O. Key) rather than a uniformly competitive two-party system.²²

Table 1.5. Effectiveness of Transfer Programs in Selected Countries

Source: Deborah Mitchell, Income Transfers in Ten Welfare States (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), p. 47.

Table 1.6. Portion of Population (%) Living in Poverty after Government Transfers, mid-1980s

Source: Derek Bok, The State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 345 (based on unpublished data provided by Timothy Smeeding’s Luxembourg Income Study).

* Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark

Perhaps the most interesting arguments are those which suggest that a certain philosophical tradition shaped or prevented the development of a leftist presence in the American political culture. There are two general philosophical schools. The first approach, argued by Louis Hartz, is the notion that a certain irrational Lockean liberalism has characterized the political discourse and development of the American political culture. Hartz contends that American political culture has been characteristically Protestant and individualist and that by the time of the Revolution a tradition of popular assembly had evolved which made Locke quite a common matter of fact.²³ Given this apparent common disposition toward individualism and the preservation of property rights at all costs, Hartz further argued that collectivism is the great secret that American history [has hidden] … from its economically energetic citizens.²⁴ In contrast, the republican thesis, as J. G. A. Pocock states, questions the image of a monolithically Lockean eighteenth century and suggests that a civic humanist interpretation of the common good, an emphasis on the concept and responsibilities of the citizen, and an aversion to social and governmental corruption have also defined the American political culture.²⁵

Drawing on the work of such philosophical historians as Pocock and Gordon Wood, Wilentz outlines the working-class variant of the republican vision as a process of ideological confrontation, negotiation, and redefinition, a fitful process that changed the meanings of old terms as much as it revived them, and that only gradually pitted employers against employees.²⁶ From Wilentz’s perspective, one can argue that the predominant republican ethos permitted and encouraged radical critiques of the emerging industrial order because it contained a certain sense of an inviolable common good.²⁷ Consequently, he posits, both entrepreneurs and radicals judged the emerging social order with concepts they shared, and in so doing transformed these concepts into different, and opposing, class visions.²⁸

As many have noted, the liberal and republican interpretations are not completely incompatible. James Kloppenberg suggests that one can conceive of the two perspectives as flip side expressions of essentially the same value orientation: Republicans and … liberals were all struggling to achieve autonomy as economic individuals and the right to equal participation as citizens.²⁹ Similarly, Jeffrey C. Isaac questions the validity of the republican-liberal distinction, arguing that this account of liberalism, and of republicanism, is flawed. It underestimates both the individualist features of republicanism, particularly in regard to private property, and the communal features of liberalism, particularly with regard to the centrality of the state.³⁰

What is intriguing about the philosophical explanations is how little they directly explain about the nature of American political culture and the elements and events that are underplayed by both the republican and liberal schools. In practice, the liberal-republican debate has been a difference over a minute range of substantive issues inside a potentially broad rhetorical and political spectrum. Rhetoric aside, the basic orientation of the two perspectives regarding such significant issues as gender and race relations and the role of the state in the economy have been quite similar historically. As Aileen Kraditor points out, the conflict-consensus dichotomy (Wilentz versus Hartz) is, to some extent, false: The conflict-consensus framework for looking at the American past can be made meaningful only if the contents of the conflicts and the contents of the consensual ideas and values are included as a necessary part of the framework. To do that is to shift the focus from the ahistorical fact of conflict or the fact of consensus, to the historically-conditioned contents of the conflicts or the shared values and opinions that constituted the consensus. But to do so is to discover at once that the opposition between ‘conflict’ and ‘consensus’ is spurious.³¹

The liberal and republican schools have failed to explain how their respective philosophical ideals were transmitted to all the people (including immigrants) who made up the real American working class and the role racial politics has played in the development of the American polity (Hartz probably being the greatest offender in this regard) or, in Alexander Saxton’s words, the ways in which racial identification [has] cut at right angles to class consciousness.³² As Rogers Smith has argued, it might be more useful to recognize that the varying civic conceptions that have informed American life have mixed liberal, republican, and [inegalitarian] ascriptive elements.³³ Overall, the republican and liberal approaches have failed to account for some of the dynamism evident in the unfolding of American history as well as the fact that American political culture has been defined by a unique combination of demographic circumstances and cultural perspectives through time. In other words, the American experience has been fundamentally heterogeneous.

Making Race

In what sense can one argue that the United States is particularly heterogeneous, and what does it mean to suggest that race explains the weakness of the left? Just as establishing and maintaining a leftist presence is an ongoing process, a dynamic undertaking that can assume different forms at different times (e.g., influence among the ranks of workingmen in the late nineteenth century versus the ability to curry favor with women, service workers, youth, and diverse communities at home and abroad required presently), race is not a given or a static construction. As Barbara Jeanne Fields notes, If race lives on today, it [is] … because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life.³⁴ Thus even though data may suggest that the United States is relatively heterogeneous (see Tables 1.7 and 1.8), such numbers are not rooted in any empirical reality (that can be measured by a linear index as suggested by the latter table) but simply reflect those aspects or signifiers of difference which have been seized on and reified by the analysts (and usually the societies) in question and which are currently perceived to be socially significant.

Table 1.7. Demographic Variation in Selected Countries

Source: World Quality of Life Indicators, 2d ed. (Denver: ABC-CLIO, 1991).

While these statistics are intriguing on a superficial level and forgetting for the moment that they are based on some problematic assumptions, they need to be put in a broader historical context to understand their limited significance. There are three ways to qualify heterogeneity and scale its probable effects. First, the nature of the heterogeneity can affect its impact on society. The degree of difference between the Flemish, Walloon, and German populations of Belgium is much smaller, for instance, than that between Canadians of Italian and Japanese descent or between British citizens of Welsh and East Indian extraction. A second factor that can affect the impact of heterogeneity on a nation’s politics is the distribution of that heterogeneity. If the distribution of the differing populations corresponds to geographic boundaries, then the option exists of diffusing tension by varying the scale of political activity, for instance, by decentralizing decision-making powers. This possibility is enhanced in states in which there is a federal structure, such as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada. In these states and in the unitary United Kingdom, the distribution of difference has corresponded roughly to regional boundaries. A third factor that can affect the impact of demographic heterogeneity is the manner in which the different groups come together. The impact of non-European immigration on the public policy histories of large recipient countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and France and on smaller recipient countries such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden has, thus far, been negligible because these states had already established the foundations of their public goods systems by the time newer citizens arrived after World War II. While non-European immigration has affected the electoral fortunes of the conventional left as anti-Semitism did in the interwar period—with the French National Front being the best example—the basic policy orientations of these societies have not yet changed.³⁵ In contrast, immigration to the United States and Canada has had a more profound impact on their respective histories (see Tables 1.9 and 1.10). In both countries the rate of immigration (primarily from Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia) reached relatively high levels in the mid-nineteenth century and again in the decades before and after the beginning of the twentieth century. These new immigrants forced both societies to reexamine their conceptions of citizenship and tested the elasticity of the prevailing definitions of whiteness and nonwhiteness.

Table 1.8. Homogeneity Indicators for Selected Countries

Source: Charles Lewis Taylor and Michael C. Hudson, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

Table 1.9. Immigration to the United States, 1820–1989

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1991), Table 5, p. 9.

Notes: The numbers are in thousands. The rate is annual rate per thousand. The rate is computed by dividing the sum of annual immigration totals by the sum of annual population totals for the same number of years.

Moreover, although the United States has drawn its population from very different sources, as has Canada, the troubled relationship between American citizens of European and African extraction has no counterpart in the Western world (see Table 1.11). At another level, the distribution of difference in the United States has not corresponded to regional boundaries sufficiently to enable Americans to limit conflict by varying the scale of political activity. States’ rights rhetoric has played a role in the development of the American polity, yet the federal structure has not provided an adequate means of responding to diversity. While Canada is by most measures as, if not more, heterogeneous than the United States, and conceptions of citizenship in both nations have been formed, to some degree, in opposition to and as a result of the exclusion and exploitation of native populations, Canada’s federal structure has functioned as a means of reducing the tensions these demographic conditions can create, particularly with regard to the anglophone-francophone divide.³⁶ Last, the fact that the majority of African Americans arrived in the United States as slaves has had no little impact on the role heterogeneity has played in the making of the American republic.³⁷ The historical circumstances under which American national identity has evolved have rendered its demographic heterogeneity particularly significant. As a consequence, despite the heterogeneity one finds in such countries as Belgium and the United Kingdom, these societies have not been marked by the degree of ethnic or racial polarization that one finds in the United States.

Table 1.10. Immigration to Canada, 1851–1981

Source: Adapted from Canada Year Book, 1990 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1990), Table 2.3, p. 2–20.

Notes: The numbers are in thousands. The rates were computed by dividing the immigration totals for the ten-year period by the total Canadian population at the end of the period. The rate reflects the percentage of Canadians who immigrated to the country in the preceding ten years.

It is important, though, to recognize that immigration figures and census data, while useful at a superficial level, assume what needs to be explained and do not reflect what are perhaps the more relevant dynamics: the manner in which difference is calibrated and processed historically or, with regard to the American case in particular, how and why race continues to be a powerful force. In The Concept of Race, Ashley Montagu describes the process by which race came to be—that is, the construction of the rudimentary means of classifying humankind, developed in the eighteenth century by two Enlightenment thinkers, Carl Von Linne and Georges Buffon.³⁸ Suggests Montagu, First the races were assumed to exist. Second, they were recognized. Third, they were described, and fourth, they were systematically classified. Continuing, he argues that if anything could have been more arbitrary it would be difficult to name it.³⁹

Table 1.11 American Population, by Race, 1790–1990

Sources: Adapted from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1960 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1960), Table 15, p. 21, and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1991), Tables 11 and 19, pp. 12 and 17.

Notes: The category Other was created for the 1860 census, broken down into American Indian and Asian/Pacific Islander in 1980, and re-created for the 1990 census. In 1990, 9% of the population was classified as Hispanic. Hispanics can be found in any of the racial categories.

As the result of a protracted (and ongoing) debate over the utility of the term race, it has become increasingly accepted in the fields of anthropology and genetics that identifiable, regular, and distinct racial groupings and differences do not exist and that variation is continuous, not discontinuous … [as] populations … are always found to grade gradually into or incline toward others. Consequently, the concept of race is deemed problematic because, as Montagu concludes, (1) it is artificial; (2) it does not agree with the facts; (3) it leads to confusion and the perpetuation of error, and finally … for all of these reasons it is meaningless, or rather more accurately such meaning as it possesses is false.⁴⁰

While empirically races do not really exist, the obsession with the implications of racial differences has affected the political activities of all Americans, in some manner, regardless of their background. As these categories have been imbued with significance, the behavior and perceptions of Americans have been affected so as to give even greater life to an essentially artificial realm.⁴¹ Consequently, much of the demographic variation that makes Canada a heterogeneous society is contained within the category of white in the United States. Similarly, it has been noted that Caribbean Hispanics, upon arriving in the United States, tend to divide more sharply along black-and-white lines in their residential patterns, primarily because [of] U.S. attitudes about race.⁴² The prevalence of racialism has resulted in the preservation of the Hispanic and Asian classifications, even though the categories include a wide range of peoples, cultures, and national origins.⁴³

Race cannot provide a moral compass for a people attempting to come to terms with a new environment or changing circumstances. Race, as a consequence of its artificial origins, cannot sustain a coherent system of values; it provides few useful clues as to what is up or down, good or bad, desirable or undesirable. The popular acceptance of race as a significant realm of human existence has left many Americans without a means of making sense of their surroundings.⁴⁴ If some sense of a collective identity is necessary to sustain the development of a left, the popular American attachment to an artificial conception of identity—race—undoubtedly has hampered the aggregate’s ability to respond consistently and comprehensively to the challenges posed by the experience of modernization.

It is in this context that the increased attention to the growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian Americans is interesting. Predictions that Hispanics will outnumber blacks as the leading minority group by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the growing significance of Asian Americans primarily in the West, and the high rates of intermarriage among all groups (except, it should be noted, blacks) have created the possibility that the bipolar dialectic (i.e., black versus white) that has underpinned American developments for so long might be transcended and perhaps that these changes might encourage Americans to move beyond race (see Table 1.12). From a historical perspective, though, the United States has always had a diverse population and has been at the crossroads many times before (e.g., the immigration of others such as the Irish, Germans, and Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century, and eastern and southern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and it has chosen every time simply to redefine whiteness (for example, to include the Irish and Germans) and/or blackness (to include Chinese immigrants on their arrival in the late 1840s) so as to maintain the basic dichotomy.⁴⁵ Accordingly, Ronald Walters has suggested that Asians and Hispanics might end up being honorary whites.⁴⁶ Similarly, Michael Lind has contended that what seems to be emerging … is a new dichotomy between blacks and nonblacks. Increasingly, whites, Asians and Hispanics are creating a broad community from which black Americans may be excluded.⁴⁷ Americans, as they have been at a number of similar junctures throughout their history, are presently faced with demographic circumstances that challenge the binary racial codes that have organized and given shape to their social interactions for so long. It will be interesting to see if these new opportunities produce new outcomes and, to borrow from Richard Rodriguez, a new language, or if the prevailing racial categories are simply reupholstered.⁴⁸

Table 1.12. Population by Group in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1990

Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990; Raphael J. Sonenshein, The Prospects for Multiracial Coalitions: Lessons from America’s Three Largest Cities, in Racial Politics in American Cities, 2d ed., ed. Rufus P. Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb (New York: Longman Publishers, 1997), p. 267.

To return to the issue of the nature of the relationship between race and the left, Americans have faced a unique set of demographic challenges in comparison with citizens of most industrialized nations. These challenges have, thus far, more often presented obstacles than opportunities to leftist movements, dependent as they are on the mobilization of collectivist sentiments. Conceptions of whiteness and blackness have proved to be not only rather elastic but also resilient over the course of American history. Despite the many fluctuations in the texture and temper of American ethnic discourses, the outcomes have been remarkably consistent. Thus, although the meaning and substance of leftism have certainly changed over the last 150 years (roughly going back to the beginning of the industrial era) and although Americans have had numerous chances to remake themselves free of the hindrances of whiteness, blackness, and otherness in general, at every opportunity the choice has been to remake race in some potent form at the cost of community.

To date the vast majority of analysts of American exceptionalism have either questioned the validity of the perspective (e.g., Wilentz and Fredrickson) or have sought to explain it by other means: ideology (Hartz, Lipset); the frontier